"Provided you have fine ingredients, I think that cooking is mostly a matter of technique. And it’s the technique that I am interested in trying to show, because if you master that you can do whatever you want. Although there is much decrying of classical cooking nowadays, and of Escoffier and so on and so forth, I do think most of the talk is from people who are not real students of cooking. The classical training teaches you what to do with food and how to do it. If you don’t have that background, you really have nothing solid to depend on. Of course, you have to develop your taste for food, but that comes from experience—from eating, discussing, studying, experimenting—from taking food seriously."